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You are confused two thing though. First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Their peo

You are confused two thing though. First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Their people, born in that country, fight that war, and they win. Second, after the war, the winning party didn't do a great job to improve the country and condition. That's another discussion.

throw0101a 5y ago
> First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. And some people did not want to live under socialism/communism, and asked the US in defending themselves. The two countries, North and South Vietnam, and their allies, agreed to end hostilities: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords North Vietnam then broke that agreement: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam)
- nguyenkien 5y ago
  Without USA & France we wouldn't suffer from that war
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    No doubt. And without the US and the UN the people in South Korea would be living in the same conditions as North Korea IMHO. I'm honestly curious how a non-socialist/communist South Vietnam would look like. (I speak as someone whose family is from Central/Eastern Europe: so while I was not born in a totalitarian system, I visited family a few times while it was still around.)
    - platinumrad 5y ago
      You are aware that Vietnam was eventually reunified under the North right? And that it's nothing like North Korea today?
      - benjohnson 5y ago
        Yes, Vietnam is awesome - and there's a lot of capitalism going on even if it's not official. But it's also no South Korea or Taiwan as far as development. The Vietnamese people are smart, clever, hard-working, and I really do appreciate them and I hope their government gets out of their way so they can shine.
        larzang 5y ago
        I must have missed the parts where South Korea and Taiwan were bombed into the stone age for years and then forced to repeatedly fight their neighbors for continued survival. From the virtually complete annihilation of civilian infrastructure in the north to the widespread deforestation, poisoning, and unexploded ordinance in the south, the US barely left a country behind. Such comparisons are incredibly disingenuous without a view of how long Vietnam had to spend just rebuilding functioning infrastructure, education, etc and all without wealthy foreign investment. The Vietnamese people and government should be applauded for everything they have achieved.
        freddie_mercury 5y ago
        It is hard to make a comparison between South Korea or Taiwan and Vietnam. South Korea was the recipient of one of the largest and most consistent foreign aid packages for decades. From 1946-1978 South Korea received as much foreign aid from the US as all of Africa combined over the same period. (South Korea has a population of 50 million; Africa has a population of 1.3 billion.) And then on top of that was the military aid from the US, which made up 20-40% of all aid. Half a billion dollars just under the CRIK program from 1950-1956. Even today, the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on its military presence in South Korea. And that's just from the US. Japan also contributed billions of aid and development money. Meanwhile Vietnam received no foreign aid and was instead under a 30-year trade embargo until 1995. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the embargo was removed, the Vietnamese economy began growing strongly (9.5% growth in 1995). A similar story can be told about Taiwan and the massive economic and military aid it received from the US. Plus South Korea and Taiwan were both single-party dictatorships with state-directed economies for decades, so it isn't really clear what was so great about them being "state capitalistic but not democratic". See the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, for instance.
  - ncfausti 5y ago
    I lived in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of months (before the pandemic). Vietnam is probably my favorite country I have ever visited. I hope to come back soon. When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill. I was so unbelievably ashamed for my country and it's awful leaders during that time. The more I've learned about the war in the time since, the more I've started to understand that we are heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit growing up, particularly in relation to our foreign policy blunders. I'm sorry for the suffering inflicted upon your country and people.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      Weird, because I grew up in the 80s and 90s and there was nothing but negative press about the Vietnam War. Consensus has been that it was a giant mistake for most of the past couple decades.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - dundarious 5y ago
        I think you're right it was quickly viewed as a "blunder", even just before the war's end, but I think GP might feel that "mistake" is underselling it to a shocking extent. The Strategic Hamlet Program amounted to herding people in South Vietnam into concentration camps -- no, not as awful as those of the Nazis, but concentration camps nonetheless. There were many other brutal policies inflicted on non-combatants (not just spontaneous outbursts, policies).
        chrisco255 5y ago
        Have you watched any movies about the Vietnam War? Like Casualties of War (1989) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097027/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097027/, Apocalypse Now (1979), etc : https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000091595/ https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000091595/ To argue that Americans have been 'heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit' doesn't square up with the coverage and popular media about Vietnam that I've seen since I've been alive. Virtually all of the movies and press are about disillusioned soldiers, brutality, violence, lost causes, etc. The North had Hanoi Hilton and Desert Inn and plenty of places it kept and tortured political dissidents and American POWs in violation of the Geneva convention. The Vietnam War was a giant mistake, a huge blunder, however, as others have mentioned the Korean war was fought under similar pretexts and no one regrets the U.S. stepping in to save South Korea. I don't know whether or not the U.S. made all the right choices in the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. Would you prefer a world in which the U.S. hadn't engaged at all against Russia or stayed completely out of Asia (as well as European conflicts)? I don't know if the world that exists today would be better or worse off, really hard to say.
hourislate 5y ago
>First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. My understanding of the war was the USA wasn't there to make Vietnam the 51st State. They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  > the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists How could the Viet Cong have been as successful as they were if they didn't have substantial support in the south? There was supposed to have been a referendum on re-unification in 1956, but it was cancelled by South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  > They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists. Vietnam was absolutely a second world country at that time, and it was an awful proxy war for many people. The theory that was used was the domino theory, that if a first world country would fall to a second world country, then others would start to fall in a "line of dominos".
peteretep 5y ago
It wasn’t a war of independence from the US, it was a civil war the US was dumb enough to get involved in.
- refenestrator 5y ago
  It was always a war of independence, first from France and then from the US. It would have been over by the mid-1950s, otherwise. 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.
  - stevenwoo 5y ago
    It could have ended in 1919 or even 1940's, lots of lost opportunities. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-18/little-known-story-vietnamese-communist-leader-ho-chi-minh-s-admiration-us https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-18/little-known-story-vi...
  - wahern 5y ago
    There was huge ethnic and class component to the Vietnam conflict. In fact, in many ways it was far more important than the nominal communist character of the North, at least from the Vietnamese perspective. Here's a factoid I recently learned: something like 80+% of Vietnamese refugees were ethnic Chinese (Hoa people), despite constituting a minority of the population from which they fled. Rarely discussed in American history, except perhaps in in-depth treatises, is that ethnic Chinese were the merchant and ruling class in Vietnam for generations, including during colonial periods. That's why the French favored them. It's a classic colonial/imperial techniques to favor a minority group, though AFAIU France basically kept class divisions as they found them. And such minority groups tend to disfavor complete independence as it leaves them more vulnerable. Indeed, continued ethnic conflict after the U.S. departed instigated China to invade Vietnam a few years later. If the U.S. had fully appreciated the ethnic divisions, it may have made different decisions. State-side the choice to prop up the wealthy, Catholic Diem is well known, but the usual characterizations of that choice completely gloss over the deep and substantial ethnic divisions. (Almost all Vietnamese Catholics were ethnic Chinese, though only are minority of ethnic Chinese were Catholic.) They make the U.S. seem merely tone deaf as opposed to tragically mistaken about the underlying social dynamics. The push for socialism in Vietnam wasn't about political ideology; it was about wrestling control of capital away from a discrete minority ethnic group. Those ethnic enmities ran deep. Without pursuing some of the social reforms sought by Ho Chi Minh a U.S.-backed South Vietnam was always destined to fail. The irony is that as Vietnam has modernized the same social dynamics have crept back. Ethnic Chinese once again control much (or most?) of the private assets in Vietnam. I have no idea if the ethnic animus has returned to its prior levels, though. Maybe it doesn't matter as much anymore.
lightgreen 5y ago
> First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Most countries which became dependent on the US became rich and prosperous. West Germany, Japan, South Korea. Also, it is much better to be dependent on the US, than dependent on USSR or China. But of course many left-leaning americans don't understand that. Most of them never lived and never ever visited shithole countries where communism has won and their knowledge of the subject is limited to propaganda posters with Che Guevara portrait. Feel free to downvote, I don't care.
- bavent 5y ago
  "shithole countries" - clearly you have never been to Vietnam.
  - lightgreen 5y ago
    No I haven't been to Vietnam specifically, but I've been to other countries. Also, you don't need to visit a country to learn what it's GDP per capita compared to other countries in the region. And you don't need to visit the country to learn that it's citizen are used as a source of cheap unskilled labour, in the country and abroad. Vietnam is not doing too bad though, they are gradually switching to proper market economy.
    - bavent 5y ago
      Somehow I just knew if I looked back in your comment history, I would find some racism, and an impressive amount of dead/flagged comments. Take the hint dude, a lot of people think you're wrong, a lot. This doesn't mean you're being persecuted, by the way. It can just mean you're wrong. It's ok. I'm wrong a lot too. Maybe reflect on your opinions a bit and reconsider a few of them?
      - lightgreen 5y ago
        > Take the hint dude, a lot of people think you're wrong, a lot. The orange website is quite left-leaning, and there's nothing racist in my comments. Your opinion is understandable, but it doesn't mean I'm "wrong". And no, I'm not going to bend to groupthink. Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience is a greatest achievement of western civilization, and I'm going to use it despite of increasing number of attempts of left-leaning activists to shut it down. > Maybe reflect on your opinions a bit and reconsider a few of them? Believe me, I do it, when I learn something new. But only then, but not when I'm downvoted/flagged or told I'm wrong or racist.

throw0101a 5y ago

> First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. And some people did not want to live under socialism/communism, and asked the US in defending themselves. The two countries, North and South Vietnam, and their allies, agreed to end hostilities: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords North Vietnam then broke that agreement: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam)

nguyenkien 5y ago
Without USA & France we wouldn't suffer from that war
- throw0101a 5y ago
  No doubt. And without the US and the UN the people in South Korea would be living in the same conditions as North Korea IMHO. I'm honestly curious how a non-socialist/communist South Vietnam would look like. (I speak as someone whose family is from Central/Eastern Europe: so while I was not born in a totalitarian system, I visited family a few times while it was still around.)
  - platinumrad 5y ago
    You are aware that Vietnam was eventually reunified under the North right? And that it's nothing like North Korea today?
    - benjohnson 5y ago
      Yes, Vietnam is awesome - and there's a lot of capitalism going on even if it's not official. But it's also no South Korea or Taiwan as far as development. The Vietnamese people are smart, clever, hard-working, and I really do appreciate them and I hope their government gets out of their way so they can shine.
      - larzang 5y ago
        I must have missed the parts where South Korea and Taiwan were bombed into the stone age for years and then forced to repeatedly fight their neighbors for continued survival. From the virtually complete annihilation of civilian infrastructure in the north to the widespread deforestation, poisoning, and unexploded ordinance in the south, the US barely left a country behind. Such comparisons are incredibly disingenuous without a view of how long Vietnam had to spend just rebuilding functioning infrastructure, education, etc and all without wealthy foreign investment. The Vietnamese people and government should be applauded for everything they have achieved.
      - freddie_mercury 5y ago
        It is hard to make a comparison between South Korea or Taiwan and Vietnam. South Korea was the recipient of one of the largest and most consistent foreign aid packages for decades. From 1946-1978 South Korea received as much foreign aid from the US as all of Africa combined over the same period. (South Korea has a population of 50 million; Africa has a population of 1.3 billion.) And then on top of that was the military aid from the US, which made up 20-40% of all aid. Half a billion dollars just under the CRIK program from 1950-1956. Even today, the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on its military presence in South Korea. And that's just from the US. Japan also contributed billions of aid and development money. Meanwhile Vietnam received no foreign aid and was instead under a 30-year trade embargo until 1995. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the embargo was removed, the Vietnamese economy began growing strongly (9.5% growth in 1995). A similar story can be told about Taiwan and the massive economic and military aid it received from the US. Plus South Korea and Taiwan were both single-party dictatorships with state-directed economies for decades, so it isn't really clear what was so great about them being "state capitalistic but not democratic". See the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, for instance.
- ncfausti 5y ago
  I lived in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of months (before the pandemic). Vietnam is probably my favorite country I have ever visited. I hope to come back soon. When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill. I was so unbelievably ashamed for my country and it's awful leaders during that time. The more I've learned about the war in the time since, the more I've started to understand that we are heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit growing up, particularly in relation to our foreign policy blunders. I'm sorry for the suffering inflicted upon your country and people.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Weird, because I grew up in the 80s and 90s and there was nothing but negative press about the Vietnam War. Consensus has been that it was a giant mistake for most of the past couple decades.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dundarious 5y ago
      I think you're right it was quickly viewed as a "blunder", even just before the war's end, but I think GP might feel that "mistake" is underselling it to a shocking extent. The Strategic Hamlet Program amounted to herding people in South Vietnam into concentration camps -- no, not as awful as those of the Nazis, but concentration camps nonetheless. There were many other brutal policies inflicted on non-combatants (not just spontaneous outbursts, policies).
      - chrisco255 5y ago
        Have you watched any movies about the Vietnam War? Like Casualties of War (1989) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097027/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097027/, Apocalypse Now (1979), etc : https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000091595/ https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000091595/ To argue that Americans have been 'heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit' doesn't square up with the coverage and popular media about Vietnam that I've seen since I've been alive. Virtually all of the movies and press are about disillusioned soldiers, brutality, violence, lost causes, etc. The North had Hanoi Hilton and Desert Inn and plenty of places it kept and tortured political dissidents and American POWs in violation of the Geneva convention. The Vietnam War was a giant mistake, a huge blunder, however, as others have mentioned the Korean war was fought under similar pretexts and no one regrets the U.S. stepping in to save South Korea. I don't know whether or not the U.S. made all the right choices in the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. Would you prefer a world in which the U.S. hadn't engaged at all against Russia or stayed completely out of Asia (as well as European conflicts)? I don't know if the world that exists today would be better or worse off, really hard to say.

hourislate 5y ago

>First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. My understanding of the war was the USA wasn't there to make Vietnam the 51st State. They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists.

bigbillheck 5y ago
> the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists How could the Viet Cong have been as successful as they were if they didn't have substantial support in the south? There was supposed to have been a referendum on re-unification in 1956, but it was cancelled by South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem.
IncRnd 5y ago
> They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists. Vietnam was absolutely a second world country at that time, and it was an awful proxy war for many people. The theory that was used was the domino theory, that if a first world country would fall to a second world country, then others would start to fall in a "line of dominos".

peteretep 5y ago

It wasn’t a war of independence from the US, it was a civil war the US was dumb enough to get involved in.

refenestrator 5y ago
It was always a war of independence, first from France and then from the US. It would have been over by the mid-1950s, otherwise. 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.
- stevenwoo 5y ago
  It could have ended in 1919 or even 1940's, lots of lost opportunities. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-18/little-known-story-vietnamese-communist-leader-ho-chi-minh-s-admiration-us https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-18/little-known-story-vi...
- wahern 5y ago
  There was huge ethnic and class component to the Vietnam conflict. In fact, in many ways it was far more important than the nominal communist character of the North, at least from the Vietnamese perspective. Here's a factoid I recently learned: something like 80+% of Vietnamese refugees were ethnic Chinese (Hoa people), despite constituting a minority of the population from which they fled. Rarely discussed in American history, except perhaps in in-depth treatises, is that ethnic Chinese were the merchant and ruling class in Vietnam for generations, including during colonial periods. That's why the French favored them. It's a classic colonial/imperial techniques to favor a minority group, though AFAIU France basically kept class divisions as they found them. And such minority groups tend to disfavor complete independence as it leaves them more vulnerable. Indeed, continued ethnic conflict after the U.S. departed instigated China to invade Vietnam a few years later. If the U.S. had fully appreciated the ethnic divisions, it may have made different decisions. State-side the choice to prop up the wealthy, Catholic Diem is well known, but the usual characterizations of that choice completely gloss over the deep and substantial ethnic divisions. (Almost all Vietnamese Catholics were ethnic Chinese, though only are minority of ethnic Chinese were Catholic.) They make the U.S. seem merely tone deaf as opposed to tragically mistaken about the underlying social dynamics. The push for socialism in Vietnam wasn't about political ideology; it was about wrestling control of capital away from a discrete minority ethnic group. Those ethnic enmities ran deep. Without pursuing some of the social reforms sought by Ho Chi Minh a U.S.-backed South Vietnam was always destined to fail. The irony is that as Vietnam has modernized the same social dynamics have crept back. Ethnic Chinese once again control much (or most?) of the private assets in Vietnam. I have no idea if the ethnic animus has returned to its prior levels, though. Maybe it doesn't matter as much anymore.

lightgreen 5y ago

> First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Most countries which became dependent on the US became rich and prosperous. West Germany, Japan, South Korea. Also, it is much better to be dependent on the US, than dependent on USSR or China. But of course many left-leaning americans don't understand that. Most of them never lived and never ever visited shithole countries where communism has won and their knowledge of the subject is limited to propaganda posters with Che Guevara portrait. Feel free to downvote, I don't care.

bavent 5y ago
"shithole countries" - clearly you have never been to Vietnam.
- lightgreen 5y ago
  No I haven't been to Vietnam specifically, but I've been to other countries. Also, you don't need to visit a country to learn what it's GDP per capita compared to other countries in the region. And you don't need to visit the country to learn that it's citizen are used as a source of cheap unskilled labour, in the country and abroad. Vietnam is not doing too bad though, they are gradually switching to proper market economy.
  - bavent 5y ago
    Somehow I just knew if I looked back in your comment history, I would find some racism, and an impressive amount of dead/flagged comments. Take the hint dude, a lot of people think you're wrong, a lot. This doesn't mean you're being persecuted, by the way. It can just mean you're wrong. It's ok. I'm wrong a lot too. Maybe reflect on your opinions a bit and reconsider a few of them?
    - lightgreen 5y ago
      > Take the hint dude, a lot of people think you're wrong, a lot. The orange website is quite left-leaning, and there's nothing racist in my comments. Your opinion is understandable, but it doesn't mean I'm "wrong". And no, I'm not going to bend to groupthink. Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience is a greatest achievement of western civilization, and I'm going to use it despite of increasing number of attempts of left-leaning activists to shut it down. > Maybe reflect on your opinions a bit and reconsider a few of them? Believe me, I do it, when I learn something new. But only then, but not when I'm downvoted/flagged or told I'm wrong or racist.